Movie Reviews

1 commentsWoody Allen's new film To Rome With Love generates no particular excitement or surprise, but it provides the sort of pleasure he seems able to generate almost on demand. The New Yorker who claims to...

8 commentsWhether you're a man or a woman, making money by allowing people to push cash inside your G-string is, I think we can agree, demeaning. It's probably worse for women because the big spenders with $2...

0 commentsWe live in an age of speed-up, which may explain why the Spider-Man franchise feels the need for a reboot only 10 years after its first picture, and five years after the most recent one. In its broad...

3 commentsWes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events, and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything...

0 comments"Rock of Ages" is a rags-to-riches rock 'n' roll musical set mostly in a music club on Sunset Strip, and winning no prizes for originality. A lot of it is zesty entertainment, there are some...

0 commentsRidley Scott's Prometheus is a magnificent science fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn't have the answers. It's in the classic...

0 commentsSnow White and the Huntsman reinvents the legendary story in a film of astonishing beauty and imagination. It's the last thing you would expect from a picture with this title. It falters in its...

2 commentsMEN in Black III comes 15 years after the entertaining original and 10 years after the sequel laid an egg, and the surprise is it's better than the first one. Given the passage of time, the entire...

2 commentsTIM Burton's Dark Shadows is all dressed up with nowhere to go, an elegant production without a central drive. There are wonderful things in the film, but they aren't what's important. It's as if...

0 comments
Friends with Kids
Director: Jennifer WestfeldtStarring: Jon Hamm, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph
Playing: Downtown~R - 100 min
There must be a better reason to have a baby than to provide a plot...

0 commentsThe Vow is a well-behaved, tenderhearted love story about impossibly nice people. It's not even about whether they'll get married. They've been happily married for four years. The problem is,...

0 commentsI know a novel that begins: "This is the saddest story I've ever heard." Now here is one of the saddest movies I have ever seen. It is sad because a woman has chosen to lead her life in a way that is...

1 comments"The Grey" is an unrelenting demonstration that wolves have no opinion. When they attack, it's not personal. They've spent untold millennia learning how to survive, naked and without weapons, in...

0 commentsIs it possible to forget that "The Artist" is a silent film in black and white and simply focus on it as a movie? No? That's what people seem to zero in on. They cannot imagine themselves seeing such...

0 commentsThe Tuskegee Airmen were a group of African-American fighter pilots who were trained despite the racism entrenched in the U.S. armed services at the time, were deployed in action, and achieved fame...

0 commentsJoyful Noise is an ungainly assembly of parts that don't fit, and the strange thing is that it makes no particular effort to please its target audience, which would seem to be lovers of gospel choirs...

0 commentsYes, we imagine, international espionage is probably pretty much like this. No thrilling car chases and no big action sections, but rather a series of weary men, smoking and drinking tea or whisky,...

1 commentsThe closing shots of Steven Spielberg's War Horse will stir emotions in every serious movie lover. The sky is painted with a deeply red-orange sunset. A lone rider is seen far away on the horizon....

0 commentsMission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a terrific thriller with action sequences that function as a kind of action poetry. The best one has Tom Cruise hanging more than 100 stories up on the glass...

0 commentsMaking lists is not my favorite occupation. They inevitably inspire only reader complaints. Not once have I ever heard from a reader that my list was just fine and they liked it. Yet an annual Best...